Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday January 26, 2014 @10:21AM
from the all-tunnels-clear-conditions-good dept.

phmadore writes "Version 1.4.0 (.TAR.GZ)of the most intellectually challenging OSS game out there (IMO), OpenTTD (Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe), is near at hand. Of course, most servers are still running 1.3.3 (the last stable, major version change, from November/December-ish). N-Ice.org typically waits until a stable release has been around for a minute to implement the changes into its online client (which is as yet unavailable as a binary for Linux; it varies only slightly from the official release and non-Windows users are able to interface with it no problem), but there are exciting developments coming down the pipe for OpenTTD. 'The new SSE blitters were also further improved. Not immediately noticeable but useful in the future, are the new string codes to display amounts of cargo in NewGRFs. For our Korean users, the separators in numbers were fixed.'
Here is some information on the history of OTTD."

For me OpenTTD has lost a lot of the fun of the original TTD. The graphics and music are all replaced and I just prefer the original graphics and music. The signaling is now way more complex and while I'm sure that makes the train tracks much closer to real life, it makes it a lot harder to get into the game than the original by Chris Sawyer. I also think that unfortunately the development team have an extremely stubborn attitude to porting nice new features over to the main codebase. Last I checked, the copy/paste functionality wasn't ported in because "it's cheating". Sorry, no it isn't; it means you don't have to keep creating the same boring complex junctions over and over again.

It makes total sense for me, if you realize that your job is to be just a transport company, not a redistribution company.

Up to now (and of course you can still stay in that mode in the new version), you would just take the lumber from a forest and deliver to whatever sawmill. But in reality, you should deliver it to whatever sawmill the forest has contract with! I.e., sawmills will make contracts with forests and use you just as a transport company - then your job is to get the cargo from the correct forest to the correct sawmill.

(An important playability factor is that only reachable destinations are considered. So if you just created a dedicated line between two industries, you will not be asked to transport the cargo elsewhere.)

(N.B. I didn't try the cargodist mode yet so I'm not 100% sure if it works the way I'd suppose it works. I'd also expect it to allow you to enable it just for passenger+mail, as these are really special cases compared to other cargo.)